Media News - Thursday, November 20, 2008

Microsoft to work for new standard for interaction with media sites

In a move to redefine the often testy relationship between online publishers and search engines, Microsoft plans to help European media owners protect and profit from copyrighted material online, the company's top intellectual property lawyer, Thomas Rubin, said Wednesday. Rubin said Microsoft planned to work more closely with publishers on the development of a new technological standard that would give them more control over what happens to their material after it has been referenced by search engines like Microsoft's Live Search, Google and Yahoo. The standard, called the Automated Content Access Protocol, 'has the potential to be an important element of more vibrant business models for publishers in the future,' Rubin said, in the text of a speech prepared for delivery Thursday in London. His comments, while stopping short of a full embrace, are the strongest endorsement of the new standards by any of the major search engines, which follow fierce clashes between Google and publishers over copyright issues. The Automated Content Access Protocol was introduced a year ago, and is supported by hundreds of publishers, said Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council. So far, though, no major search engines have adopted the system. Instead, they use a 15-year-old program called robots.txt. To ensure that their articles turn up in searches, publishers also have to keep using robots.txt, which gives them little control over what happens to their material after it has been released on the Internet. Rubin said adoption of the new protocol could encourage publishers to make additional information available in digital form. Some newspaper publishers, for instance, have been reluctant to open their archives online. (International Herald Tribune)

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